From Ancient Grudge Break to New Mutiny
In 1985, Hellas Verona won the Serie A title. Thirty years later, a provincial scudetto seems almost an impossibility.
It rained in Verona on May 12th 1985. Yet, around midday, several hundred Veronese gathered on Piazza Bra, their city’s main square, and stood beneath a patchwork quilt of umbrellas, nervously awaiting updates from a football match taking place in the Lombardian town of Bergamo. By midnight the rain had dispersed, but the crowd had not. Its mood, however, had turned from apprehension to euphoria: with a 1–1 draw away to Atalanta, Hellas Verona had just won their first, and possibly last, scudetto.
Seven days later, still-delirious Hellas fans descended on the Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi to mark the occasion. “A week of celebration accompanied us to the last [match] of the season with Avellino,” said Preben Elkjaer, the club’s Swedish forward, in 1996. “That Sunday the stage was beautiful, everything coloured gialloblù.”
Elkjaer remembers correctly. The Bentegodi heaved long before kickoff, the stands a sea of yellow and blue flags. Beneath these waves of pennants and banners, the fans swayed and sang in time with the gaudy 1980s recording of Inno di Hellas blaring from the loudspeakers. Viva Verona calcio e Verona città, they roared, and the implication was clear. Hellas is Verona. And Verona has conquered Italy.
“The city explodes with joy” was L’arena di Verona’s summation the day after that bacchanal against Avellino. Yet much of this joy was rooted in more than just appreciation of a remarkable sporting achievement. In A Season with Verona Tim Parks notes that when it comes to Serie A, “everything must be seen in terms of established rivalries, the ever-vibrant force-fields of Italian national life — north/south; big city/small city. There is nothing that can happen in Italian football that will not be seen in terms of an ancient quarrel”. To Hellas supporters, the 1985 championship meant more than the mere feat of winning a football league. It gave them the chance to lord it over all those around them — and not just the giants of Milan, Rome or Turin; as much as provinciali like Hellas hate the big teams, they hate each other.
However, although the habitual sight of an Inter or Juventus captain holding aloft the Serie A trophy was absent in 1985, most observers felt this was an aberration. The Italian media quickly dismissed the Hellas victory as, more than anything else, a collective slip-up from Juve, Inter and the rest of the big boys.
“While the city lauded their club […] a bemused press first hailed the victory as a miracle before rather dismissing it as such,” noted Matthew Barker in 2011 for When Saturday Comes. Gianni Brera, the grand old despot of Italian football journalism, called the title win “not particularly glorious”, and appeared to lump most of the credit on Hellas’s Milanese coach Osvaldo Bagnoli.
But media scepticism was ultimately justified. The next season, Hellas dropped to tenth and Juve won their 22nd title: normal service resumed. Hellas quickly entered a period of decline and, in 1990, they were relegated to Serie B. They would spend the remainder of the decade and the beginning of the new millennium flitting between first and second tier. By 2010 — a year described by Charles Ducksbury in When Saturday Comes as “the worst in the club’s history” — the gialloblù were plumbing the depths of Serie C1 and even went so far as to almost drop to the fourth level of the pyramid. It was a bad way to mark a year that also happened to be the 25th anniversary of the 1985 scudetto.
In 2013, Hellas returned to Serie A under the guidance of their sui generis coach Andrea Mandorlini, a brash and forthright journeyman who was part of the Inter side that finished third behind Hellas in 1985. Mandorlini has cultivated a kindred-spirit sort of connection with Hellas fans and players alike, based largely on his embracing of regional one-upmanship. His borderline-racist remarks about southern Italians and occasional 50-metre dashes to celebrate goals have made him a cult figure among Hellas supporters (who are no strangers to casual racism), an Adriatic blend of Ron Atkinson and José Mourinho.
But despite his “controversial” nature, few coaches understand better what it means to be part of the provinciali; since retiring as a player in 1993, he has pitched up at the likes of Triestina, Atalanta, Bologna, Padova and Siena. He is a man with whom the gialloblù can identify, a man of their own in the dugout; a provincial for the provincials. Such a statement may seem trite, but regional identity matters to Hellas fans, and Mandorlini understands this: “I am proud to be one of Livorno’s sworn enemies”, he played to the gallery before a game against the Tuscans in 2012.
Under Mandorlini’s supervision, Hellas’s ascent from third to first tier has been as rapid as it was in the eighties with Bagnoli. Yet though Bagnoli’s elevation of the club through the divisions ended with a scudetto, it’s unlikely that Mandorlini will be able to do the same. As pointed out by John Foot in Calcio, “The unpredictability of the championship, which occasionally threw up romantic stories of loyalty, team spirit and shock results, [has] been killed off by the corporate nature of the contemporary game.”
The gap now between the provincials and their big-city overlords is just too big. In 2015, “success” for a provincial team means survival, local bragging rights and the rare pleasure of a victory over the corporate giants that rule Italian football. The provinciali have been consigned indefinitely to the outskirts of Serie A, their rightful place in a world belonging to the Torinese, Milanese and the Romans (and occasionally the Neapolitans): since Verona’s finest moment in 1985, only Sampdoria (1991) have broken the stranglehold that the major cities have held on the scudetto.
The truth is that Hellas’s greatest moment was exactly as anomalous as Brera and co made it out to be. Verona could never have sustained their position at the peak of Serie A, where the strong always reassert their dominance when brought low by the weak. The rest of the country saw Hellas as nothing but an upstart to be cut down to size: from the big-boys there came the haughty indignation of heavyweights floored by a middleweight, and from the other provinciali only spiteful envy: why wasn’t it us instead?
As Parks remarked of the title-winning provincials in an article for The Guardian in 2001, “None of them were ever loved. They represented their towns. They were part of the mad antagonism between ancient regional rivals that makes Italian football so exciting, and sometimes so dangerous.”
It may not occur any time soon, but let’s hope that this mad antagonism can once again produce a team to repeat the unforeseen success of Hellas Verona in 1985.
For further imagery/reading about Hellas: Primo Luglio (Italian)